In 2004, Gutmann’s book, Losing the New China, exposed American corporate collusion in the construction of China’s controlled Internet, and contributed to Congress cross-examination of Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Cisco Systems. Following David Kilgour and David Matas’ seminal 2006 report, Bloody Harvest, Gutmann began an independent investigation into Chinese state-sponsored organ harvesting of Falun Gong, interviewing over 100 refugees, doctors, and law enforcement personnel over a six-year period. The Slaughter, published in 2014, profiled several doctors who had either participated in live organ harvesting in China or had contact with mainland hospitals exploiting Falun Gong organs (his full email correspondence with Dr. Ko Wen-je can be downloaded at: http://www.ethan-gutmann.com/ko-wen-je-interview/). Documented a pattern of “retail organs only” Falun Gong physical examinations, Gutmann established that similar tests were administered to Tibetans, Uyghurs, and House Christians.

While the Chinese medical establishment confessed in 2006 that China’s transplants depended on death-row prisoner organs, the leadership consistently denied exploiting religious and political prisoners and claimed that China was exclusively relying on voluntary organ donors by 2015. Yet in the Summer of 2016, Kilgour, Matas and Gutmann released a report demonstrating that Chinese transplant volume was six to ten times higher than Chinese official claims. Gutmann was invited to testify in Washington, London and Brussels, while Congressional and European Parliament resolutions explicitly condemned China’s organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience. With the New York Times, CNN, and the Times of London reporting on the issue for the first time, international medical societies that had been supportive of the Chinese official claims of reform, such as The Transplantation Society, publicly admitted that the Chinese medical system had “appalled” the world. In short, by the end of 2016, Beijing had lost the argument.

Ethan Gutmann wishes to thank the National Endowment for Democracy, the Earhart Foundation, and the Peder Wallenberg family for funding, and Leeshai Lemish and Jaya Gibson for research assistance. He also wishes to acknowledge critical support from Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, End Organ Pillaging, Benedict Rogers from Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Matthew Robertson from the Epoch Times, and former Miss Canada, actress Anastasia Lin. Finally, he would like to acknowledge the courage of witnesses throughout the world who risked it all to get the truth out.

]]>https://eastofethan.com/2017/02/27/nobel-peace-prize-nomination-2017/feed/0eastofethanSetting the Record Straight: The controversy over Dr. Ko Wen-je and “The Slaughter”https://eastofethan.com/2015/01/27/setting-the-record-straight-the-controversy-over-dr-ko-wen-je-and-the-slaughter/
https://eastofethan.com/2015/01/27/setting-the-record-straight-the-controversy-over-dr-ko-wen-je-and-the-slaughter/#respondTue, 27 Jan 2015 16:35:46 +0000http://eastofethan.com/?p=332Here are my comments on the Taiwanese media frenzy over “The Slaughter,” including my clarification of any final ambiguities surrounding my interview with Taipei’s new mayor, Dr. Ko Wen-je. I have also made photos available of my email correspondence with Dr. Ko. They can be downloaded on my main website (scroll down to the bottom of the page). To order The Slaughter, go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Random House.

How did your book end up as a centerpiece of the Taipei mayoral campaign?

Ethan Gutmann:
In “The Slaughter,” Dr. Ko describes visiting a mainland hospital to look into the quality of organ transplants in China for his clinic’s Taiwanese patients. After he became aware that Falun Gong practitioners’ organs were being used to source the transplants, Ko quietly attempted to introduce more transparency into the organ donation system in China. He failed, but in my book, I described Dr. Ko as a man of “singular courage.”

Somehow, many in Taiwan skipped over that part. In October, with Dr. Ko Wen-je looking good in the polls, partisan elements seized on The Slaughter to accuse Dr. Ko of being an “organ broker.”

Exploiting inaccurate, out-of-context, translations of my writing, the issue dominated Taiwanese media coverage for nearly a week, culminating in a press conference where Dr. Ko denied the press charges and portrayed aspects of my book as inaccurate and unauthorized.

Yet Dr. Ko was responding to a claim that I never actually made in The Slaughter. As my lawyer, Clive Ansley, stated: “No English-speaking reader to date has understood for one moment that Dr. Ko was acting as an ‘organ broker’”.

Did Dr. Ko show any interest in purchasing human organs or actually getting involved in the Chinese organ trade?

Ethan Gutmann:
Would an organ broker have given me an interview? Of course not. Dr. Ko was simply concerned with the welfare of his clinic’s patients.

How did Dr. Ko become part of your book in the first place?

Ethan Gutmann:
In July 2008, my research assistant and I initiated an interview with Dr. Ko because we had heard that he might know something about organ harvesting in China. Dr. Ko began with a rather generic story: A clinic with aging patients who need organ transplants. A surgeon who visits mainland China to scout out the quality of the care. The surgeon inquires at a hospital about transplant procedures and prices. After getting to know the Mainland doctors, they respond that his clinic’s patients will receive the discounted Chinese price.

People bargain in China. That’s not news. So the interview wouldn’t have made it into my book except for one critical twist: the surgeon was told that the Taiwanese patients, should they come to this hospital, would receive particularly healthy organs. Why? Because the organ “donors” were Falun Gong–that is, prisoners of conscience.

This occurred in 2004-2005, before any allegations of systematic organ harvesting from Falun Gong had surfaced. So the scale was a mystery. But Dr. Ko sensed he had stumbled into something terrible: Mainland doctors, in at least one hospital, were killing Falun Gong for their organs.

Perhaps other Taiwanese doctors were given glimmers of that same discovery. What sets Dr. Ko apart is that he tried to do something about it, single-handedly creating a standardized medical form that would force mainland doctors to actually enter the organ “donors’” identity. Dr. Ko thought this might drive the practice of harvesting Falun Gong underground, although, as he told me ruefully, it would “only remove 95% of the problem.” Over the years, Dr. Ko tried to get Mainland doctors to adopt the form. They refused. So Dr. Ko did something else. He spoke to a journalist.

That’s you. How exactly did Dr. Ko’s interview end up in your book? What was the process?

Ethan Gutmann:
The entire process was outlined in my book: by prior mutual agreement, the conversation was confidential. I did not record it. And my memory for dialogue is actually pretty good, but memory alone clearly wouldn’t justify the account that you see in the book.

Over the years, my researcher called Dr. Ko occasionally. I also called him to ask whether a central database of Falun Gong practitioners existed in China. Dr. Ko responded that harvesting operated in an informal eBay-style system. His English wasn’t smooth on the phone, but it was obvious to both of us that we were discussing the harvesting of Falun Gong.

In June 2013, I decided to try to get Dr. Ko’s permission to publish his account as an “anonymous Taiwan surgeon.” I seldom run my writing by an interview subject before publication, but because we did not record the interview, my researcher e-mailed Dr. Ko an advance draft–karaoke bar and all–and posed the following questions in Chinese:

“1. Under the circumstances that we don’t mention your name, specific situations, or any details, is it okay to write this content?

2. Is his draft of the story (below) according to reality? Is it factual? Because at the time we didn’t record and didn’t ask you too much about this direction, so there are some situations we are not too clear about, we just remember the general drift. Could you take a look and tell us where the story has inaccuracies? If it’s incorrect, how should it be correctly stated?”

Dr. Ko’s response: “the story seems Ok.”

In January 2014, we asked Dr. Ko to allow his real name to appear with the account in The Slaughter, to be published in August. Dr. Ko’s response was: “OK, for what I say I can be responsible.” He then provided, upon request, a high-resolution portrait of himself to be published in the book. In short, Dr. Ko had three clear opportunities to say: “Just a minute, let me take a look at that account again.” The emails show that no substantive differences between what Dr. Ko received and what was published in the book–even after my publisher’s rigorous editing.

Over 100 witnesses were interviewed for my book. Some actually risked their lives–and the lives of their families–for this investigation. Not one has objected to The Slaughter. If Dr. Ko had expressed even minor reservations, I would have struck the account.

Do you hold a grudge over any of this? Do you think Dr. Ko does? And what do you see as the way forward with Dr. Ko at this point?

Ethan Gutmann:
My best wishes go out to Dr. Ko and the people who have worked to elect him. I continue to believe that Dr. Ko is an ethical man who—in agreeing to be named in my book—was doing his part to end a human rights atrocity. It is unfortunate that Dr. Ko felt the need to distance himself from his account in the heat of a political campaign.

Yet people say a lot of things in political campaigns. I don’t take remarks personally. And, as my researcher suggested, it’s entirely possible that Dr. Ko and I have different recollections of some aspects of our interview. So I will address Dr. Ko’s concerns in the preface to the Chinese edition of “The Slaughter” and I have no problem sticking an asterisk next to certain statements. Perhaps Dr. Ko negotiated in China on behalf of his clinic and not individual patients. Perhaps Dr. Ko and the surgeons never visited a karaoke bar. Perhaps Dr. Ko never made appointments for Taiwanese patients on the Mainland.

But none of this changes the fact that Dr. Ko signed off on my account of the interview. And none of it alters my thesis: that we were discussing organ harvesting from Falun Gong. Why else would Dr. Ko have discussed Falun Gong harvesting being temporarily halted for the Beijing Olympics? I played with Dr. Ko’s standardized medical form on his computer. Did Dr. Ko create the form to defend the rights of murderers and rapists? No, when Dr. Ko said the form would only remove 95% of the problem, he was referring to Falun Gong. There can be no asterisk on this point.

Yet I still wonder: why did Dr. Ko sign off on my account during his election campaign? Odder still, why didn’t he have a prepared response when the account surfaced? The simplest explanation is probably correct–Dr. Ko is an honest man who, particularly in January 2014, was still a political neophyte, unprepared for the cynical personal attacks that accompany political campaigns.

Yet I’m guilty of that same naiveté so I can hardly stand in judgment on this point. We learned our lessons the hard way, you might say.

In your view, what’s the way forward for Taiwan?

Ethan Gutmann:
I’m sure it feels quite different to anyone who worked in the campaign, but as a human rights investigator, I see this as just one more skirmish in a very long war over forced organ harvesting. The Chinese Communist Party would have loved to see Dr. Ko and I rip each other apart. Instead, my attorney’s legal responses exonerated Dr. Ko. I remain hopeful that he will further advance the cause of saving innocent lives in China.

But let’s talk about political reality. The Taipei mayoral position may be a stepping stone to the Taiwan presidency. Well, can a Taiwanese president openly acknowledge the harvesting of political and religious dissidents in China? Can a witness even negotiate with the Party on Taiwan’s behalf? A candidate for mayor of Taipei, and potentially, the presidency, might want to keep that in mind.

Yet no matter how normal, level-headed, even justified, those words might sound, isn’t this a sort of cancer, this endlessly creeping rationalization for not offending Beijing? And isn’t there a whiff of hypocrisy in this entire affair?
Elements in Taiwanese society were eager to accuse Dr. Ko of being an “organ broker.” Yet Taiwanese citizens regularly go to the mainland for organs, even though the odds are that a Uyghur, a Tibetan, a House Christian or a Falun Gong practitioner will be killed so that a Taiwanese citizen will live. So unless Taiwan bans organ tourism outright, as Israel has, shouldn’t Taiwan itself be characterized as an “organ broker state”?

Taiwan cannot change China, but Taiwan can follow its own values. If anything good has come out of the Dr. Ko controversy it is this: Taiwan has stumbled into something terrible. And more than any other people in the world, the people of Taiwan are in a unique position to know the truth.

Just a few months ago, the Chinese Medical Establishment reneged on their serial promises of ending the practice of harvesting prisoners for their organs. Here is a recent screenshot from the Declaration of Istanbul website. The photograph, taken in October 2013, now serves to remind us of the potential folly of Western engagement at all costs. The Hangzhou resolution was ultimately a delay tactic. The slaughter of prisoners of conscience–Uyghurs, House Christians, Tibetans, and Falun Gong–continues.

Screenshot source: “The Hangzhou Resolution and Report of Meeting with Minister Bin Li of the National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China,” Declaration of Istanbul Website.http://www.declarationofistanbul.org/index.php option=com_content&view=article&id=424:the-hangzhou-resolution-and-report-of-meeting-with-minister-bin-li-of-the-national-health-and-family-planning-commission-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china&catid=50:articles-relevant-to-the-declaration&Itemid=67 (accessed May 23, 2014).

“In an age of compassion fatigue, Gutmann relies on one simple truth: those who have made it back from the gates of hell have stories to tell. And no matter what baggage the reader may bring along, their preconceptions of China will not survive the trip.”

“If there’s one thing we should all agree on, it’s protecting women from violence.”

So tweeted Valerie Jarret in the same hour that Leon Panetta made the announcement that the Pentagon would allow women to serve in combat. I’m with Jarret. Here’s my supporting statement:

“My fervent prayer for future warfare: all fighting will be done by a few 18-year-old male geeks in really cool machines far, far away from the planet earth.”

(Kind of like BattleBots–best sport ever. Look it up.)

Yes, the 20th Century fell a bit short in terms of protecting women from violence, didn’t it? All that strategic bombing. All that total war. From crossbow to hydrogen bomb the history of warfare since Napoleon’s rise has been one of greater and greater “inclusion”–including the “equal-opportunity” citizens of Warsaw, London, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo or Hiroshima. The relatively recent development of smart bombs, precision-guided munitions, laser technologies seemed to offer the beginning of a technical end-run from the massive slaughter of civilians. Okay, nothing in war is pleasant, but it’s an improvement over say, the bombing and use of napalm on North Vietnam that occurred in my lifetime. Somehow, the US military and the Admin seems bound and determined to quarantine that progress, to neglect the value of that trend. Perhaps because it will never work perfectly; there will be human shields, there will be munition factories staffed by pregnant women, there will be awful bumps in the road.

But stay the course: the US must consistently signal that it is against “inclusion” in warfare–that it really is taboo, as a species, to indiscriminately kill women, children and the aged, that we genuinely want to shrink the target set, that don’t endorse doomsday strategies. One critical way to do that is to continue the trend of making US combat troops increasingly professional and yes, increasingly rare.

Although Nat Hentoff is an atheist and a leftist, he took a pro-life position in the abortion debate. His main exhibit was a thought experiment: imagine a woman being bayoneted; imagine a pregnant woman being bayoneted; notice the emotional and moral distinction between the two images. I submit that moral picture applies to war as well.

No top-down policy can erase, or wish away, our species-wide instinct to protect those who give life–or our inability to forgive those who hurt them. For it is those sorts of atrocities–pregnant women, young mothers and children being killed in Belgium for example–that gave birth to the Western trenches of World War I, and ultimately, to strategic bombing, to the age of genocide that we have just passed through.

Stimulated by the politically galvanizing effect of the tragic Newtown shooting, I suspect that there are more than a few in the Administration who harbor secret fantasies, who never want a serious crisis to go to waste; at the expense of a few female atrocities, the US engaging in warfare will become simply too painful. War itself will become impossible.

You might ask: Is it really possible that members of the Administration want to use my niece in combat so they can shed crocodile tears over her body-bag in some perverse political photo-op? Well, yes. And if that’s the motivation, even if it’s a subconsciousness one, it’s a deeply immoral impulse. I mean, why not enlist my nine-year-old or my aging dad in combat too–just like the defense of Berlin? But even if such a plan–to make warfare taboo through the use of limited female sacrifice–is justified by a conscious, chilly, utilitarian calculation of long-term morality and the greater good, as long as an enemy lives and breathes, the calculation is flawed by its essential ignorance. Following the Great War, Douhet’s Theory of strategic bombing–which most intelligent people subscribed to at the time–premised exactly the same idea. After the first bombs were dropped on urban centers, the common people in horror and revulsion would rise up and force their leaders to sue for peace. How did that work out in London in 1940? Or, for that matter, in Berlin? History shows, quite conclusively, that we are not just an aggressive species. Once war begins, we are a deeply vengeful one.

There may be many noble motives at work within the Administration and the highest level of the Pentagon. I don’t preclude that. But their naive assumptions have proliferated to the point of irrationality. Women in combat is a Pandora’s Box which contains the potential to usher in a second age of total war.

Read the first chapter:

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this profoundly important hearing. Beginning in 2006, I began conducting comprehensive interviews with medical professionals, Chinese law enforcement personnel, and over 50 refugees from the Laogai System, in order to piece together the story of how mass harvesting from prisoners of conscience evolved in China. Based on my research, the practice began in Xinjiang in the late 1990s. By 2001 the practice expanded nationwide, with Falun Gong providing a much larger, and frequently anonymous, pool of potential ‘donors.’

Yet my time today is short. I too was skeptical when I began my investigation, as some of you may be today. So instead of offering my conclusions, I invite you to draw your own conclusions from my evidence—twelve witnesses, each of whom fills in a critical piece of the organ harvesting puzzle—before I speculate, briefly, on the implications and the full human cost.

I’ll also touch upon the potential function of the quit-the-CCP movement

I think most people in this room are familiar with Harry Wu’s research. Harvesting criminals began in the 1980s. By the early 1990s it had become systemic, a practice involving “organ donation” consent forms and mobile harvesting vans at execution sites. The donors were criminals. And whether or not the criminals signed the forms under duress, they had been convicted of capital crimes under Chinese law.

My first witness, Nijat Abdureyimu, special officer, 1st Regiment, Urumqi Public Security Bureau, doesn’t dispute any of that. But he does note that by 1994, the doctors doing the harvesting became increasingly uninhibited. That’s when his fellow officer puzzled over the screams—“like from hell”—that he heard coming from a harvesting van. Two years later the prison’s medical director confessed to Nijat that organ harvesting from living human beings—they would expire during the surgery of course—was now routine.

My second witness, Dr. Enver Tohti, general surgeon, based in an Urumqi hospital, recalls an execution ground outside the city in 1995: a prisoner shot in the chest, not to kill, but to send the body into deep shock, minimizing the squirming and contractions that could make harvesting problematic. Under his supervisor’s firm direction, Enver performed a live surgical extraction of the man’s liver and kidneys.

The execution ground was commonly used for political prisoners, and the man had long hair, rather than a convict’s shaved head. But Enver will not speculate, nor will I: there are no fully credible allegations of doctors harvesting political or religious prisoners—who only very rarely can plausibly be sentenced to death under Chinese law—until 1997, the year of the “Ghulja Incident.”

My third witness, a nurse who worked in a Ghulja hospital, describes a hospital turned upside down: arrest of any doctor who dared to treat a Uyghur protestor, forced segregation of Uyghur medical staff, and Chinese doctors administering slow-acting lethal injections to any Uyghur baby who had the misfortune of being a second child. Finally, she describes, six months after the Ghulja incident, the case of a 21-year-old Uyghur protestor, harvested for his kidneys by a Chinese military hospital.

That timing jibes with my fourth witness, a young doctor ordered to blood-test prisoners in the political wing of an Urumqi prison on behalf of six highly placed Party officials in search of healthy organs. As these political prisoners were not on death row, they panicked and had to be restrained. Against every fiber of conscience in his being, the young doctor played his part. “It’s just for your health,” he said, as he drew blood. Six months later there were six new Party cadres, and the cycle repeated.

The next eight witnesses—Qu Yangyao, Wang Yuzhi, Wang Xiaohua, Jing Tian, Dai Ying, Fang Siyi, Yu Xinhui, and Liu Guifu—come from different backgrounds and were held as prisoners in strikingly different facilities throughout the Chinese Laogai System. Yet all have two things in common: they are all practitioners of Falun Gong, and they were all given strikingly similar medical exams. The doctor, usually military, drew a large volume of blood. Then a chest x-ray. Then a urine sample, probing of the abdomen and, in most cases, a close examination of the corneas. Did the doctor ask any of them to trace the movement of his light? Did he wiggle his fingers to check the peripheral vision? No. Only the corneas. Nothing involving brain function, no hammer on the knee, no lymph nodes, no examination of ears or mouth or genitals—the doctors checked the retail organs and nothing else.

I defy the Chinese authorities to furnish a plausible medical explanation for such tests. Or why these tests were given to thousands of Falun Gong men and women—particularly women, often matched with an individual guard to prevent any disruption. Or why there were special buses arranged to take away Falun Gong practitioners after extensive blood testing. Or why, as time progressed, “Eastern Lightning” Christians, or Tibetan activists, were given the same exams.

I can’t supply a death-count for House Christians, Uyghurs and Tibetans. But I estimate that 65,000 Falun Gong were murdered for their organs from 2000 to 2008. And given my time limitations here, I request that you include my recent chapter in State Organs (which explicitly explains the methodology behind that number) along with two articles, “China’s Gruesome Organ Harvest,” and “the Xinjiang Procedure,” in the record of today’s hearings. Anyone who reads this material will quickly grasp the obvious: The demand for the harvesting of political prisoners came not from triads, but aging party cadres. China is a surveillance state, aimed at observing party members and the military. Wang Lijun himself was given an award for medical innovation in organ harvesting. So “Party Central” knew about this. This was state-run. And any reader will quickly grasp why the quit-the-party movement cannot be a reform-the-Party movement.

But ultimately, my writing and my testimony cannot do justice to these twelve witnesses. I cannot replicate the sensation of a guard’s tears falling on my arm as she says that she “can’t bear to see… a living person about to be wiped out in front of my eyes.” But there is one more thing that draws all twelve witnesses together: even if I have protected some of their identities today, I can report—with certainty—that every one of these witnesses has consented to testify openly before this committee. And if they do, a Taiwanese surgeon who can indisputably verify that Falun Gong organs were being used for his aging patients is likely to step forward as well.

Testimony by such witnesses takes courage. It carries intense risks for their families. Shortly after Nijat first consented to an interview with a Swiss paper, his sister, back in Xinjiang, was arrested for three months. And yet, these witnesses have begun to realize that there is strength in the collective narrative and in transparency—particularly if the West, and in particular, the US government, facilitates this transparency. Sadly, no such support has come forward in the six years since the first allegations surfaced. Much more evidence has accumulated since that time, but our government has done little. A tragedy is being played out, even in this hearing today, for in the final analysis, these witnesses are the men and women who should be sitting in this chair today, not me.